cathoderaydude
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Building a new "set"
🕑 Added 2021-01-01 20:33:13 +0000 UTCI live in a very small house in a part of the country where houses are not typically very large. I know that compared to an apartment this is probably a mansion, but to put it simply, there are very few parts of this house that are useful for my purposes.
For instance, although I have a large basement area I could convert into a very respectable and proper studio set, I would have no way of isolating the sound from the rest of the house (and the three people I live with) just to pick one problem. There are countless others.
Consequently, I am limited to a single room, something like 11x14', which must fit all of my hobbies, all of my work (since I do an IT/networking job from home, so I have to have switches and routers and firewalls hooked up at all times) and my "studio."
When I started making youtube videos I was literally just pointing a camera at whatever I was doing with minimal presentation or even cleanup because, honestly, who was watching it? Yeah, I put in some effort to make a publicly-presentable work, but I knew I was expecting maybe 300 views, from people who mostly knew me personally, and that's exactly how it played out.
Suddenly I'm becoming a bit more notable, and while 14k subscribers is not Hollywood and isn't even "big" for a youtube channel, everyone keeps telling me (and I'm grateful for your support) that I'm gonna have 100k by the end of 2021. Well, we'll see about that, but I certainly don't want to drive anyone away with a veneer of apathy, because I do care about how I look, I just didn't have a lot of choices for improvement that didn't require huge commitments.
The biggest change in my style was 10 or so videos ago when I built a presentation table so I could make my points about the NES RF modulator effectively, and that seemed to bring in a lot more people, but my office is *very tight.* To wit, see the first attached picture. There's no room other than what you see there, and obviously everything is absolutely crammed in to make it work at all. I basically had to move stuff to the side every time I shot a video.
Another big problem is that my office is in a basement. Two walls are concrete, which is miserable to work with - I know I could improve the surface texture, but it's an ungodly amount of work and requires a ton of drilling and material I can't really get easily right now. The third wall is drywall, but it's where my PC is and that can't really move. But I realized that the fourth wall, which is also drywall, could make a nice, unobtrusive backdrop if I turned the entire office 180°, re-mudded the wall (the original drywall work was a real rush job) and painted it.
So that's what I did, with the help of my long-suffering girlfriend who supports me more than I deserve - I made a time lapse of the whole process so far; I'll warn you that my ass is almost certainly visible in several points if you pause it, I just do not have the patience to frame-hunt every single ass-shot. C'mon, it's construction work, asses are gonna hang out.
I don't think I'm going to get a Hollywood-quality, or even TV-quality 'set' out of this. I'm not a designer, I don't know what's a good color scheme or anything - dark blue seemed like a good idea for the sake of high contrast and low reflection, but who knows, maybe when I shoot my first video in front of it I'll go "oh no this is horrible." Hopefully however it'll be a lot easier to watch my stuff without the visual noise of all that crap back there - although I do intend to put some on-topic decorations up as soon as some new furniture arrives.
If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears, but I just wanted to give everyone a peek at what's (probably) coming. Happy New Year, everyone! Here's to a better one!
Comments
Cathode Ray Dude
It was yeah, an experiment that didn't go anywhere. The blue was absolutely for chromakey, worked really well, much better than the projector would have.
Is that a ceiling-mounted projector? I always assumed you chose blue so you could use chroma keying/blue-screen to add graphics on the wall behind you in post!
The satisfaction from these projects is significant but still doesn't give me the motivation to do any of it very often. Good work. The new set looks great on YT
